Watch the Virtual Boy emulated with the Oculus Rift

Oculus Rift dev kits began shipping out to buyers at the end of last month, and are already yielding examples of third-party wizardry at a rate of about one magic garage gadget per week. Today’s comes courtesy of a modified version of VBjin, the long-running emulator for Nintendo’s infamous eye-enemy console thing.

Cymatic, who you can see braving Virtual Boy’s version of Mario Tennis in the video above, used VBjin-ovr - an adapted edition of the Windows emulator which supports the Rift. He reports the process proved “really easy”: “Select Oculus Rift mode from the menu and load the rom!”

“It works extremely well, to the point that I had a 3 hour session with pinball and red alarm,” he said. “There is no head tracking of course, but the image fills your vision and the old school graphics look sharp. The 3d is spot on for most titles.”

Another user recommended a few tweaks needed to experience the Rift-enabled Virtual Boy at its full, ah, potential. Under VBjin’s ‘View’ settings, you’ll want to select either Red or Greyscale under ‘Coloring’, Oculus Rift under ‘Splitting Mode’, and Both under ‘Video Display’.

After that, you only need open the Rom of your choice and press alt+enter to enable its utterly terrifying fullscreen mode. Enjoy! Is that the right word?

While the modders deserve credit for finagling this into working on the Rift, it's still the Virtual Boy. Red and Black is an eye killer. Even in Greyscale... I can't see it being worth it. There's a reason Nintendo won't acknowledge this thing, even though they could emulate these games on the 3DS to make a quick buck.

What fans/modders should do is just remake the VB games worth replaying. Wario Land, Mario Clash, Red Alarm.... I think that's it. Do them with modern tech so that they are not headache-inducing anymore, and hope Nintendo doesn't shut you down.